


Someone to Come

by 8sword



Series: His Fucking Kids [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dad!Dean, Gen, M/M, Professor!Castiel, dad!Cas, stepsisters!Claire and Emma, volunteering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 16:18:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Was Cas ever in the hospital?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone to Come

 

Cas has a lighter class load in the summertime, teaching only one or two classes rather than four or five. Instead of spending it at the community pool or vegging on the couch like normal people do, he spends it at the retirement home on the edge of town, playing chess with residents in the day room or reading quietly to the ones too weak to leave their rooms. Many days, he spends his hours in the hospice wing, sitting with the patients who don't have family to sit by them in their last moments, who don't have anyone but the nurses coming in to put the atropine drops under their tongues to help them breathe and adjust the morphine to help the pain.

It's not something he talks about, really, not even to Dean. But one afternoon Emma goes with him to the home.

It's not something she intended to do. More like, Cas said she could use his Honda for the day if she took him to the retirement home in the morning and came to pick him up in the afternoon, so she plans just to drop Cas off and then go to the mall. But when they pull into the parking lot, somewhere in the very corner of Emma's mind there's still the memory of Emily and her Camels, her Sudoku and how, for at least a few moments in that wretched hospital, she had made Emma feel less alone.

So she goes inside with Cas. And the moment she follows him into the first room, hanging close behind him like a little kid hanging onto his parent's coat, she regrets the decision: the smell of old people, of morphine, of the Jell-o liquefying on the leftover breakfast plates.

She doesn't want to be here. The rooms in rows, the people trapped and watched. It's too familiar.

She leaves.

 

 

But the next week. The next week, when Castiel is pulling on his loafers to head out to the car. She sidles down the staircase with a few Sudoku books tucked under her arm and her hair brushed and her shoes on and she mumbles, "Can I come with you?"

"Of course," Cas says, as serene as ever.

She slides off on her own once they get there and sign in. Maybe she can't do the hard things, maybe she'll never be strong enough to do the things she should be able to do, but there's a circle of women crocheting in the corner, one of them still with her breakfast tray on the table in front of her and her hand trembling as she tries to lift the spoon to her mouth, and that's where Emma goes.

 

 

At the end of the day, Cas doesn't ask if she'll be coming back with him the next week.

He rolls down his window, instead, and Emma rolls down hers, too. The parched July air whips through their hair, stripping it of the smell of disinfectant and anticholinergics and clothes not left long enough in industrial dryers, and when Cas proposes picking up gelati to take home, Emma only runs over the curb in the drive-thru a little bit.

(Dean makes fun of the new scuff mark he sees on the Honda's rims when he gets home. Cas shoulders the teasing with good grace, the corner of his mouth curling up at Emma as Dean talks about it being time for Cas to get some glasses, old man.

"As if you need any more excuses to jump me, Dean," Cas says, and Dean goes red and stops talking.)

 

 

"I think what's hard," Emma says on one of those afternoons, driving home from the facility and sweating in the late afternoon sun at a red light. "What's hard is that I can't stop thinking that someday it'll be me. Like that. You know?"

Castiel's hand smoothes along the edge of his open window.

He was with a hospice patient, today, and all of a sudden it occurs to Emma that today might not have been the best day to initiate this conversation.

"Is that not," Castiel says, and his voice is strangely quiet, "motivation to do what you have been doing?"

She frowns. "What, like...paying it forward?"

"If you were the one," Cas says, "trapped and alone within your body, unable to speak. Would you not wish for someone to come, and to speak to you as though you still existed?"

"Yeah..." Emma says uncertainly. And then, more firmly: "Yes."

Cas gives her a small smile. It seems almost pained.

Emma doesn't ask any more questions, that afternoon.

 

 

Curiosity killed the cat. Dad tells her that all the time, as if he has any room to talk ("I told you if you hacked my internet history you wouldn't like what you'd find!"), but it's not like Emma plans it. It just sort of...comes out, one day.

"Was Cas ever in the hospital?"

Dean's standing at the table, chopping rutabaga. Emma's across from him, picking hole in the carrots instead of peeling them. Cas is still at school, and Claire's at quiz bowl practice, and it's that time of late afternoon when the sun slants through the windows just right to make the dust in the air glow, to light Dean and Emma's eyes up until they're the same color, for once.

A red line appears on Dean's thumb, starts to well up with blood. His eyes are on Emma, and he doesn't even seem to notice the knife blade digging into his skin.

Finally, abruptly, he straightens up, clearing his throat. He begins to pare again. "Why?"

"Something he said." Emma isn't sure if she should back up now, should say,  _never mind, it's none of my business_ , because a guilty part of her knows that if Cas had intended for her to know, he would have told her himself.

Dean's quiet for another long minute.

"There was this time," he says at last. "Sammy was in the hospital 'cause of, well, some magic shit, I guess you could call it. He didn't know what was real and what wasn't, and, uh. Cas made it so he'd be under the spell instead of Sam."

"But you figured out how to break it," Emma says. Because otherwise Cas wouldn't be with them, now.

"Yeah. Eventually. but..." He hesitates, his thumb sweeping down the rutabaga slowly. "We left him in that hospital for a long time."

Claire comes home, then, and Cas. Cas goes straight for the first aid kit in the cabinet when he sees Dean's thumb, making disapproving sounds, and Claire congratulates Emma on wearing matching socks, for once, and the moment breaks, dissolves into the hubbub of a normal Novak-Winchester evening. But as Emma lies in bed that night, staring at the popcorn ceiling, it begins to solidify again, precipitating out like lead in solution.

_Would you not wish for someone to come, and to speak to you as though you still existed?_

 

 

"When you look at them," Emma says the next week. They are in the car, sweating against the vinyl seats. "Do you remember?"

Cas's window is down. He doesn't seem surprised by her question, or by what it reveals: that, somehow, she knows.

"I do," he says. "I remember being trapped inside this body. Inside my mind." He is quiet. "I remember thinking it was no less than I deserved, being forced to endure the same imprisonment I inflicted upon Claire's father."

Emma catches her breath. This is something they don't talk about. Ever.

"And yet," Cas says quietly, "daring to hope that I would be saved."

Emma bites her lip. "You were."

" _I_  was," Castiel says simply.

 

 

There are things between the four of them that have been forgiven, and things that have not; things that should not have been forgiven that have, and should have been that have not. Things between Cas and Dean, between Dean and Emma, between Claire and Cas. Things they may never be able to move through, only around, respecting the spaces where ghosts would be if they had been able to stay.

 

 

At home, Claire is doing practice SAT questions at the table. Dean is kneading dough at the counter. He smells like Crisco and garlic and the pre-heating oven when Emma sidles over to him, and he loops his elbow awkwardly over her head so she can lean against him as he digs his palms into the dough.

"You smell like old people," he tells her.

"That's 'cause I live with you," she says.

"Oho," says Claire. "You should probably run some cool water over that, Dean."

"Cas," Dean says. "Your kids are making no sense again."

"I'm sorry, did you not understand that reference?" Cas deadpans perfectly. Claire shoots him a smirk.

"You know what?" Dean says. "Fuck you guys, this awesome food's going to be all mine. You can go find your own dinners."

"Don't be that way, Red Hen," Emma says, and Dean gets her in a headlock and gives her a noogie with his Crisco-covered fingers until her hair is sticking up as wildly as Cas's.

 

 


End file.
